The North’s other pandemic

Finally! A standardized system for classifying polar expeditions! Plus, dead lakes, snow gardens, huge drums, and reclaiming the original North. All in this week’s Up Here newsletter.

So, let's talk about the last year. A year of isolation and social distancing and being stuck at home. It was around this time last year that Yellowknife photographer Pat Kane started taking his isolation portraits. He wasn't the only photog to visualize society's sudden quarantine through shut doors and closed windows, but he may have been the first. People were trapped in their homes—if they were lucky enough to have one, that is.

Nunavut’s housing shortage is, according to Jim Bell, a major humanitarian disaster: “For Canada, a rich, self-satisfied G7 nation, it’s a national embarrassment, a dark stain on our country’s reputation.”

Bell’s editorial comes after this report from Nuntasiaq about how the top-paid Nunavut government employees occupy the vast majority of staff housing. Inuit make up 50 per cent of the territory’s government workforce, but only a quarter of its staff housing. How fair is it, askes Iqaluit-Niaqunnguu MLA Pat Angnakak, “for our most highly paid executives to live in heavily subsidized staff housing units?”

A 2017 senate report said the housing shortage in the Arctic was a major public health emergency. Last year, Mumilaaq Qaqqaq toured houses in the Kitikmeot and Kivalliq regions. The resulting shock contributed to the burnout that forced the Nunavut MP to take a 10-week health break.

Housing is a longstanding issue in the North. Proposed solutions failing to solve anything is also a longstanding issue. Pointing out that this is a longstanding issue is, itself, a longstanding issue.

Over in Behchokǫ̀ in the NWT, Elders have been living in homes without running water for more than a month. Celine Whane, 74, pays $50 to her neighbour to cover the utility cost of borrowing their shower. She “used to crawl under her house to seal cracked pipes with glue,” but her age and limited mobility from getting polio as a child limit that self-sufficiency now. “I cry a lot [inside]. Where is everybody? Where is everybody when you need help?"

Avery Zingel, CBC North reporter here in Yellowknife (disclosure: also a friend) has been doing some great work on this file, highlighting the lack of funding for the territory’s housing corporation, the bureaucratic mishmash that’s held up land transfers, and why NWT First Nations aren’t able to access federal housing loan guarantees.

Back east in Nunavut, the territory's stock of 5,668 social housing units is the local government's most expensive social program, notes Bell, costing $210.3 million last year. An estimated 3,500 households in Nunavut need a place to live and can’t get it. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates a local would need an annual income of $139,000 to afford to buy and maintain a single-detached house in Iqaluit.

Kane has another photo project about COVID-19 now up online at the NY Times. It's an interactive feature looking at “The Plan to Protect Indigenous Elders Living Under the Northern Lights.” When it comes to the plans to protect Elders from COVID, it has been largely a safe and secure pandemic year. There have been few deaths and only scattered, quickly contained outbreaks. Vaccines here are being distributed efficiently and en masse, as Nunavut APTN reporter Kent Driscoll spoke about this week with The Big Story podcast.

But the problems that were here in the North before coronavirus never went away. When the world goes back to normal, those pandemics will remain. (Various)

As the territories were settled by outsiders, a literal rewriting of the land took place. English names were sprinkled onto the mountains, lakes and rivers—often, the monikers of British or American men with no real connection to the region. Increasingly in recent years, countries, cities and communities—in the North and around the world—are facing their colonial histories. Reverting to traditional place names is one attempt to mend the harm. It may feel like a “new North” to some, but it’s a reclamation, not a reinvention. Rhiannon Russell writes about the original North in our latest issue. (Up Here)

A winter storm left Ulukhaktok, NWT without internet for over a week, and left cashless residents of the High Arctic community unable to pay for groceries or gas in the middle of a blizzard. (CBC)

The owners of the Diavik Diamond Mine think they can breathe new life back into Frame Lake. The “dead lake” in the heart of Yellowknife was once a swimming and fishing spot, before gold mining and city runoff left it poisoned and anaerobic. (Cabin Radio)

Author Catherine Lafferty shares her journey reclaiming both land and identity in Yellowknife for PBS. “This is what our people should be doing. We should be coming out and staking our claim.” (Newshour)

The Qaumajuq Inuit art centre is finally set to open this month. (Globe and Mail)

An old storage shed with no heat or electricity has for years acted as the morgue in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. “It is not a very nice place to put someone you love.” Some pretty gruesome details in this story, so be forewarned. (CBC)

How Indigenous Yukon languages served as inspiration for the prehistoric dialects invented for a new feature film. (Yukon News)

Congratulations to Leela Gilday, who this week picked up two Juno Award nominations for her album North Star Calling. She's up for Indigenous artist of the year (along with Igloolik’s Terry Uyarak), and for contemporary roots album. (Cabin Radio)

Also congratulations to Natalie Pressman at the Yellowknifer, who joins the unenviable club of journalists who've had to report on their own companies being sold off. Turns out the rumours of News North being sold to Black Press Media were true. No word on what that’ll mean for the journalists employed or papers distributed to many small northern communities. (NNSL)

It's just two Indigenous girls “tryna make it in an urban world.” Madeleine Begin who is Mi’kmaw from Nova Scotia, as well as Katelynne Herchak who is Inuk from Kuujjuaq and Nunavut, are the co-hosts of a new podcast, Spilling Labrador Tea Under Cedar Trees. (Spotify)

An Inuk carver sells his seal sculpture for $100. The buyer turns around and offers it through an auction house for $1,400. A reminder to investigate where you buy your Inuit art. (via Facebook)

Fort Good Hope, NWT is installing a really big drum on the Fort Good Hope-Colville Lake winter road. The steel sculpture is nearly six metres high and wide. It's being “described as the world’s largest drum” by the K'asho Got'ine government. “Currently, a traditional Korean CheonGo drum in Simcheon-Meon, South Korea holds the world record for world's largest drum.” The Fort Good Hope drum, at 5.8 metres in height and in diameter, is apparently “a little bit bigger.” Though, the South Korean drum appears to be 5.5 metres in diameter and 5.96 metres in height. Presumably, it’s also a better drum, what with not being made of steel. (CBC)

“For years, polar travellers have been claiming ever more obscure or tenuous firsts, and by and large the public, media, and record organizations (such as Guinness World Records) played along.” Well, no more! Explorers take heed: now there’s finally a standardized system for classifying polar expeditions. (Explorers Web)

The map above shows Alaska's north slope before villages were established. “In the 1930s people were forced to settle in hubs so kids could go to school,” tweets tuurraq the expluuraq, an Iñupiaq/UAF grad student in geography. “Communities all over Alaska were told where to settle for BIA schools (with easy ship access in mind) and today coastal/riverine towns face impacts related to flooding/erosion/permafrost thaw, many with critical infrastructure at risk near the beach.” (via Twitter)

80,000 reindeer may have starved to death on the Russian tundra. (Barents Observer)

Southwest Iceland is shaking, may explode. (Atlas Obscura)

A snap election in Greenland and 56,000 votes could shape the future of the rare earths industry. (Foreign Policy)

And finally, uncovering the mystery of submarine permafrost. (SciTechDaily)

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